Temperance: moderation in action, thought, or feeling : restraint

“The Angel of History” - a title given by Walter Benjamin to Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus”. The ideas developed in Klee’s print are elaborated upon and made famous by Benjamin. The image is not what we know it to be without the text, and likewise the text could not exist without the image.

Beside this angel is another, Clippit the paperclip, Microsoft’s default Office Assistant (He was renamed “Clippy” only later by Microsoft’s users). From Clippit’s Wikipedia: “Microsoft concluded (from research conducted at Stanford University) that if humans reacted to computers the same way they react to other humans, it would be beneficial to include a human-like face in their software. As people already related to computers directly as they do with humans, the added human-like face emerged as an annoying interloper distracting the user from the primary conversation.”

I originally saw this duo in a repost of a @JeSuisBebby tweet and they struck a chord with me.

The back has a drawing of a Tumblr post by user @mollyjames, about a group of angels in a bar tracking the movement of air molecules. Like the tweet, this post came to me via repost.

Between Klee and Benjamin hangs the Angel of History; between the computer and the user hangs Clippit; between @JeSuisBebby or @mollyjames and I hang users I actually follow.